General questions about materials, lightmap and performance.
interpolator
Hi, i've started to learn how to bake light this week, and have some other questions concerning performance and materials that i can't find info about.
1. What are those other colorful maps that you get when you bake lightmaps? it seems that there are 3 of them.
2. When you have modular pieces like a wall that have an exterior and interior side, can you force the baked lightmap for the interior to not be bart of the lightmap atlas for the exterior pieces?
3. I see in a lot of tutorials people saying to make a master material with a lot of custom options like blend, color tint etc then use instances of it for other materials. In this case if you have deactivated the tint for example, all of the ''behind the scene instructions'' for this action will be deactivated? Wouldn't be better to make a new material with less options instead?
1. What are those other colorful maps that you get when you bake lightmaps? it seems that there are 3 of them.
2. When you have modular pieces like a wall that have an exterior and interior side, can you force the baked lightmap for the interior to not be bart of the lightmap atlas for the exterior pieces?
3. I see in a lot of tutorials people saying to make a master material with a lot of custom options like blend, color tint etc then use instances of it for other materials. In this case if you have deactivated the tint for example, all of the ''behind the scene instructions'' for this action will be deactivated? Wouldn't be better to make a new material with less options instead?
Replies
3. Different people might say different things about this. There are pros and cons for both method. If you use a lot of booleans, you will end up with many permutations, a lot of, and long shader compilations, and more complex material overal, which might be harder to work with, and use much more memory because of the compiled variants (because of the static switches). Personally I prefer not to overcomplicate materials, and I try to minimize the usage of static switches.